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Sony DCR-IP220 Camcorder Review
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Sony's DCR-IP220 MicroMV
camcorder with an MSRP (manufacturers suggested retail price of
USD2000. It is the first camcorder of the second series of MicroMV
camcorders Sony has produced a lot of betterments. The picture quality,
however not as superb as other MiniDV camcorders are offering. The new
advanced set up combined with the touch screen Liquid crystal display
(LCD) makes the camcorder much more comfortable to operate.
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Video Performance
I was surprised with the
advances in the video quality newly featured in the DCR-IP220. The image
is sharp, and also similar to many of the lower range MiniDV camcorders.
While the image is sharp, I consider that the camcorder misses a to some
extent color depth. It is difficult to define but when I am
photographing for example a black thing and a dark navy blue item, they
can look just the same color when it is taken from a long distance.
The images are much
sharper and I think Sony when they state it records at 530 lines of
resolution. No doubt they miss, to some extent, depth to them; they seem
much more "digital", nearly like they were photographed by a high
resolution web cam. The camcorder has the general drawback of cheap Sony
digital camcorders of generating artifacts having blues and blacks in
depth. It is very difficult to judge, but I must tell that the camcorder
is approaching in performance to 1 Charge-coupled device (CCD) MiniDV
camcorders. Actually, I think that the DCR-IP220 crosses the DCR-TRV18
and have a good contest versus the DCR-TRV25/27 regarding video
distinctness. This is because of the high resolution Charge-coupled
device (CCD). But the MiniDV camcorders still succeed in brightness and
on the whole color intensity and in my outlooks create an enough good
image.
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Performance
The
DCR-IP220 offers a lot of functions related to digital stills and is
promoted as the earliest 2MP Charge-coupled device (CCD) camcorder. Yes,
it is right that the stills results are much in high resolution, but
they do not look great. While zooming in on the stills, they look much
grainy, despite of the illuminating situations. The feature is not that
great. You are just to receive enough better result with a dedicated
camera. The manufacturers can reach the maximum of the resolution of the
still on camcorders, but finally it appears it makes a dedicated camera
to create good quality still images.
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There
are a lot of functions for digital stills offered in the DCR-IP220. You
can record the stills onto Memory Sticks easily. The camcorder contains
an 8 MB Memory Stick; however there are Memory Sticks equal to the
memory of 256 MB in the market. The pictures are saved in JPEG formats.
When you push the photo button first time, the picture is showed, you
can withhold pushing the button and the picture will remain on the
display screen and not be taped onto the Memory Stick. When you keep on
pressing the button in all the way it saves the picture onto the Memory
Stick. You can set image components, switch on image effects, the title
mode and get at added options by the touch screen with the DCR-IP220.
The DCR-IP220 offers two quality modes for stills, fine and super fine.
You have also the option to shoot and save the pictures as either 1600 x
1200 or 640 x 480 pixel resolution stills. You can shift the still image
files onto your pc by turning out the Memory Stick and with the help of
an external reader or by connecting the camcorder with your pc thru the
Universal Serial Bus port.
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